The music on this disc was composed to accompany Neal Stephenson\'s novel Anathem. After hearing a short verbal description of the core ideas for the book during a dinnertime conversation in 2006, I was completely drawn into the world that Neal was creating. I began to draft musical ideas to match some of the imaginary musical traditions that he had described, and Neal supplied draft copies of his book to me as it took shape. The experimental vocal music that you hear on this disc is the result.

It was clear from day one that the characters in the book possess not one, but many musical traditions, each forged over thousands of years of isolation, and each strangely similar to, yet exotically removed from, the monastic traditions of Earth. As an active performer of Earthly
vocal music, as a lapsed musicologist, and especially as a composer, I was excited by the possibilities opened up by Neal\'s imagination: somber music to celebrate the mysteries of philosophy and mathematics within the soaring stone walls of a cloister; simple songs to ease the mathematical drudgery of verifying theories; inward meditations upon
truth and beauty; and finally, fiendishly difficult musical games designed to hone intellectual prowess.

All profits from the sale of this record will be donated to the Long Now Foundation, whose project ideas had a seminal role in the genesis of Anathem.

-- David Stutz

Some reviews for \"IOLET::Music from the World of Anathem\":

\"If Anathem often reads like a delirious mashup of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, then the music (composed by David Stutz), doesn’t so much underscore Hofstadter’s Bach as it reaches further back, to the origins of polyphony, when the magic of two near but separate voices — separate just to the point of beating — was, like any sufficiently advanced science, still something close to magic [...] The sound is quite pure, with rarified tonal color, and compositional attention to very small shifts in notes. But the point of the composition isn’t so much the notes themselves, but how they overlap when sung by multiple voices.\"
~ disquiet.com

\"Iolet\" offers ostensible hymns of the avout. These range from the hesitant, John Cage-like \"Approximating Pi\" and the digeridooish grumbling of \"Quantum Spin Network\" through the beautifully ordered near-dissonances of \"Cellular Automata\" and the dramatic harmonies of \"Deriving the Quadratic Equation.\"
~ Seattle Times

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